#common enemy in the form of laundry mountain

[krskrash]

[sensitivefern]

I have lately apparently been suffering from a mild form of auditory hallucination. I seem to hear the telephone ringing early in the morning just as I am waking up. At first, I would go to answer it, but would find that it was not ringing. Now I simply lie in bed.

[Edmund Wilson]

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A MILD ‘COMPLAINT’ I do not know exactly ‘what’ it ‘is’, but ‘something’ about a close and reverent ‘exposure’ to the work of Henry James seems to lead his commentators into a virtually ‘manic’ use of quotation marks. I have just read – or, rather, ‘read’ until my eyelids became abraded ‘beyond endurance’ by incessant typographical ‘pricking’ – the introduction, by Alma Louise Lowe, to ‘the master’s’ **English Hours*. The edition was ‘printed in England’, so the intrusive ‘marks’ were ‘single’. Some ‘specimens’...

[John Updike]

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BALTIMORE, APRIL 13, 1945. The Sun editorial on Roosevelt this morning begins: ‘Franklin D. Roosevelt was a great man’. There are heavy black dashes above and below it. The argument, in brief, is that all his skullduggeries and imbecilities were wiped out when ‘he took an inert and profoundly isolationist people and brought them to support a necessary war on a scale never before imagined’. In other words, his greatest fraud was his greatest glory, and his sufficient excuse for all his other frauds. [...] Roosevelt’s unparallelled luck held out to the end. He died an easy death, and he did so just in time to escape burying his own dead horse. This business now falls to Truman, a third-rate Middle Western politician on the order of Harding. [...] It seems to me to very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history – maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln. It will be to the interest of all his heirs and assigns to whoop him up, and they will probably succeed in swamping his critics... This a demigod seems to be in the making, and in a little while we may see a grandiose memorial under way in Washington, comparable to those to Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln.

[H.L. Mencken]

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Holly is another wind-, salt- and rabbit-resistant shrub. There is an area of shingle near us, on the coastal boundary between Kent and Sussex, called ‘the hollies’ on account of its curious, sporadic colonization by these shrubs in 10-foot-tall lumps that slope gradually upwards on their windward side but rise almost sheer on the sheltered north-east face. There is a huge selection of delightful ornamental hollies of which every gardener is likely to want one or two specimens, if not a complete wind-breaking outfit.

[The Well-Tempered Garden]

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HACKBERRY: (Celtis) Related to the elms, the common hackberry tree (Celtis occidentalis) grows as high as 100 feet, is hardy throughout almost all the United States. It is also known as the nettle tree. The sugarberry (Celtis laevigata) grows mostly in the southern states, has red fruit changing to dark purple, grows to 60 to 80 feet high. The trees generally do well in ordinary garden soil.

HARDPAN: Hardpans are impervious horizontal layers in the soil that may exist anywhere from six inches to about two feet below the surface. A true hardpan is formed by the cementing together of the soil grains into a hard stone-like mass which is impervious to water. A more common condition is an impervious layer in the subsoil caused by the pore spaces becoming filled with fine clay particles... When hard or claypans exist, the surface soil is cut off from the subsoil; no new minerals are added to the lower part of the soil; plant roots often are unable to penetrate these layers. Plant roots usually grow down to this hard layer and then extend horizontally over the top of it.

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June 26 [1853]. At Cliffs. – The air is warmer, but wonderfully clear after the hail-storm. I do not remember when I have seen it more clear. The mountains and horizon outlines on all sides are distinct and near. Nobscot has lost all its blue, is only a more distant hill pasture, and the northwest mountains are too terrestrial a blue and firmly defined to be mistaken for clouds. Billerica is as near as Bedford commonly. I see new spires far in the south, and on every side the horizon is extended many miles. It expands me to look so much farther over the rolling surface of the earth. Where I had seen or fancied only a hazy forest outline, I see successive swelling hills and remote towns.

[Thoreau, Journal]

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❚I discovered Ralph du Carrois's wonderful Share Tech Mono font five years ago. It's been my font of choice off and on over the years. Share has a unique look and feel. There's no mistaking it for another font. The characters are blocky and each one is distinctive. I particularly like the distinction between 1, l, and I. It may not seem like a great font at first. I think that's because it's so different than most monospaced fonts.

Molly, aka the Thing of Evil, did a few too many Colt .45s on New Year's Eve. Still recovering. Loved Mariah Carey, though.

Marion Nestle The FDA’s report on antibiotic use in farm animals: still increasing.

David Frum Same Sean Hannity who devoted an entire program to people accusing Bill Clinton of rape? Or different guy? ...Sean Hannity traveling to London to interview Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy. Airs tomorrow.

Sarah Silverman Look who got her new laundry detergent! Meeee!

David Frum Lessons from Poland in how populists govern... "Independent institutions are the most important enemy of populism."

The looped square (⌘) is a symbol consisting of a square with outward pointing loops at its corners. It is referred to by this name, for example, in works regarding the Mississippian culture. It is also known as the place of interest sign[2] when used on information signs, a practice which started in Nordic countries in the late 1960s. Also, the symbol is known as Saint John's Arms or Saint Hannes cross (related to Swedish sankthanskors, Danish johanneskors, and Finnish hannunvaakuna), as Gorgon loop, and as command key symbol due to its use on the command key on Apple computer keyboards.

Trump Knows All About Hacking. In the 'Age of Computer'

The Washington Post had an article about Ken Ham and his Ark Encounter, the first theme park ever devoted to a mass genocide event, and they said that he believes the (non-existent) flood killed off the dinosaurs. And he’s mad because...

Huston Smith, a renowned scholar of religion who pursued his own enlightenment in Methodist churches, Zen monasteries and even Timothy Leary’s living room, died on Friday at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 97. Professor Smith was best known for “The Religions of Man” (1958), which has been a standard textbook in college-level comparative religion classes for half a century. Professor Smith may have reached his widest audience in 1996, when Bill Moyers put him at the center of a five-part PBS series, “The Wisdom of Faith With Huston Smith.”

Two men get into a fight over a parking spot at the mall. Good thing they both had guns

Snake eats entire wallaby